Seems awfully dumb to attempt the whole "collusion on prices" thing when both you and your partner in crime are locked in your own cutthroat duopoly battles. What's to stop Coca-cola+Target from turning around and crushing Walmart+Pepsi on pricing the instant they try to "price-gouge"?
>“I actually think we’re capable of taking whatever pricing we need,” said CFO Hugh Johnston in 2022. And the company did just that, raising prices by double digit percentages for seven straight quarters in 2022-2023.
I hate to say it, but was he proven wrong? People are still buying junk food and soda (their primary products) despite prices going up. Looking at Pepsis profit margin, it seems to have hovered between 9.5% and 10.5% since 2021.
Bigger the company the more power they have to dictate the purchasing price from producers and the cost for consumers. This is not just in the food industry it is also in retail such as Amazon.
Companies like Kroger are so big they dictate the purchase prices from farms. The farmers were better off in the past with multiple competitors creating a bidding war. Same with consumers, products had to be priced right to win their business.
A company I work for had to give free engineering labor in millions of dollars to get access to one of the largest retailers in the USA. Too big not-to-do-business-with harms everyone except the retailer.
Cigarette companies (no surprise) are known to do a similar type of price fixing, although in their case it's targeting high-income shoppers for lack of discounts.
Noticed it a while locally, and national data agrees. If you want to shop for cigarettes, shop in low income, minority areas. [1] Cigarette companies specifically target stores with regular, habitual, high-income smokers for high prices and lack of discounts, while offering significant bargains in stores less than a mile away. [2]
Time for a class action lawsuit. You can submit your personal information to a wordpress powered law firm's upload forms in exchange for your twenty bucks without inflation compensation in about 5 years and they collect a cool 50% fee distributed amongst millionaire lawyers.
Shout out to Friedman, Hayek, Rand, Reagan, and their neoliberal enablers in the democrat party like Clinton. All US Citizens and the unlucky citizens of our colonies are property of US corporations. Bought and paid for. It’s about to become really obvious to anyone paying even the smallest amount of attention just how screwed anyone not in the top 1-5% really is.
The storm is likely within the administration and across governmental departments. Trump will try to drive out whoever doesn't toe his line, even if he legally doesn't have the authority to do so.
Oh! I've witnessed this quietly every time I buy soda!
I'm a habitual enough soda drinker that I'm a six-pack-a-day diet soda drinker (don't judge me, at least it's not Red Bull). I notice that there's vendor collusion at Walmart for months at a time where the Pepsi six-packs will typically go on sale for a few months at a sub-$4 to $5 price (currently it's $4.98) while Coke packs will be $5-6 off sale.
Cycle three to four months and Coke will enter the $4 position and Pepsi goes back up to a full retail price for the next quarter.
I've always seen the 'cycle' of the two competitors constantly hitting a 'sale' price across various retailers.
I used to drink a lot of seltzer purchased in those 1 liter bottles. Then I bought a countertop soda maker. I can make the same amount of soda that I was paying $1.50 for at the store for $0.20 now. (I refill my own CO2 off a 10 lb tank) I can't imagine paying more than $0.50 for a liter of soda anymore. They have got to be making an obscene profit on those drinks.
Even weirder, the drinks that I flavor myself taste way better than the ones in the store. I suspect they have been titrating their flavoring down over time. Root Beer I make myself using drink powder tastes way better than the ones from the store. Same for grape and orange sodas.
Where are the mainstream media stories about this? The article mentioned the story blowing up but a Google search showed only one media outlet covering the story.
As if we needed another reason not to buy junk food.
By the way, in France we have a 5.5% VAT on food, instead of 20% for other products. Junk food is also 5.5% but cat food is 20%.
I wonder if this is going to change some day for junk food or sodas.
The Robinson-Patman Act is terrible law. It’s been routinely violated (unknowingly in most cases) for decades across effectively every sector of the economy & enforced vanishingly rarely.
If it were to be enforced uniformly and aggressively it would be devastating: Every negotiation between a supplier and a purchaser at every level is potentially a federal crime!
If it were to be enforced capriciously, it would put unchecked power over everyday commerce—again at every level—into the hands of the FTC and its political masters.
No thanks. Repeal it so we can stop hearing about this “one neat trick to roll back neoliberalism!”
The legal theory is Robinson-Patman promotional discrimination, not a price-fixing judgment. The complaint’s factual story can imply broader price effects, but that is not the same as “proven collusion” across the whole economy.
The case was not dropped in February; it was extended.
Just stop buying Pepsi products. Stop going to Walmart. You don't need either. You don't need potato chips or soda or Gatorade or any of the other poison they produce.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 50.1 ms ] threadWhy? Unless there was some kind of payola, this is doesn't make sense.
I hate to say it, but was he proven wrong? People are still buying junk food and soda (their primary products) despite prices going up. Looking at Pepsis profit margin, it seems to have hovered between 9.5% and 10.5% since 2021.
Companies like Kroger are so big they dictate the purchase prices from farms. The farmers were better off in the past with multiple competitors creating a bidding war. Same with consumers, products had to be priced right to win their business.
A company I work for had to give free engineering labor in millions of dollars to get access to one of the largest retailers in the USA. Too big not-to-do-business-with harms everyone except the retailer.
Noticed it a while locally, and national data agrees. If you want to shop for cigarettes, shop in low income, minority areas. [1] Cigarette companies specifically target stores with regular, habitual, high-income smokers for high prices and lack of discounts, while offering significant bargains in stores less than a mile away. [2]
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6689253/
[2] https://truthinitiative.org/research-resources/tobacco-indus...
First, that made me raise an eyebrow.
> ...and failed.
Then, that made me laugh.
> And now there’s a political and legal storm as a result.
Finally, that made me sigh, because nothing's gonna happen. The "storm" will pass, as it always does.
I'm a habitual enough soda drinker that I'm a six-pack-a-day diet soda drinker (don't judge me, at least it's not Red Bull). I notice that there's vendor collusion at Walmart for months at a time where the Pepsi six-packs will typically go on sale for a few months at a sub-$4 to $5 price (currently it's $4.98) while Coke packs will be $5-6 off sale.
Cycle three to four months and Coke will enter the $4 position and Pepsi goes back up to a full retail price for the next quarter.
I've always seen the 'cycle' of the two competitors constantly hitting a 'sale' price across various retailers.
Even weirder, the drinks that I flavor myself taste way better than the ones in the store. I suspect they have been titrating their flavoring down over time. Root Beer I make myself using drink powder tastes way better than the ones from the store. Same for grape and orange sodas.
If it were to be enforced uniformly and aggressively it would be devastating: Every negotiation between a supplier and a purchaser at every level is potentially a federal crime!
If it were to be enforced capriciously, it would put unchecked power over everyday commerce—again at every level—into the hands of the FTC and its political masters.
No thanks. Repeal it so we can stop hearing about this “one neat trick to roll back neoliberalism!”
Our country and civilization is slowly turning into organized crime.